DragxitoThe walls of Apple’s garden are tumbling down
tsonfeirlol. No they aren’t.
Seriously, windows is about to release forced advertisements in the Start Menu. Windows 12 is going to be a shit show. People aren’t going to flock to Linux, they’re going to Apple. Think they have a lot of money now? Wait until they get more desktop market. They can afford to build another garden.
Say what you want about Apple, it’s probably true. But don’t pretend they don’t have gardens inside gardens.
The only way Apple will fall is if there is actual competition, and nothing is on the horizon.
The number of people who will leave windows over this stuff is trivial.
Apple has practically zero presence in enterprise (where one company can have 60,000 computers), and also practically zero in SMB.
Business software is written for windows. Even trying to use a Mac with the most basic office software is challenging - even if the exact same product exists in both.
People aren’t flocking anywhere when their work machines are windows. Damn few people can be bothered with learning 2 ways to do things, especially when they’re not interested in computing. I’ve been at this since before Mac existed, and while I can use OSX or iOS, I’m not wasting my limited learning time on something I rarely use, and can’t really integrate with much of the rest I use.
Now let’s look at some other arenas:
Legal - they all use a small set of document apps (which until recently was wordperfect), and some legal database apps. None of the database apps run on Mac as far as I’ve seen.
Engineering - there are practically no CAD apps for Mac. Some do exist, but again, even the ones that are on both Windows and Mac are problematic at best on Mac, typically unable to integrate with the back end.
Most people don’t have the bandwidth to learn a new system just to avoid the shitty part of Windows (which only affects home users anyway). It takes less effort/time to figure out how to mitigate the Windows issues than to deal with a completely new system, that will also have issues integrating with other stuff they already have.
Engineering
Add to this lack of CUDA support, which is what pretty much all CAD runs on. Apple’s Metal may be interesting, but that doesn’t matter if the apps don’t port to it.
It’ll be especially interesting to see how AI plays out. If NVIDIA ends up winning (they’re currently way ahead), it’ll be the same issue as with engineering, but in more disciplines.
Oh, yea!
The other area I meant to mention related to engineering is external device control.
Things like specialized controllers for things like CNC, many of which won’t even run on NT-based systems, and still have to run Windows 9x to have the DOS-level hardware control.
Do you know if they work at all on Linux? Just wondering what the path forward there is.
And yeah, we had an old Windows system with our pick and place machine because it really needed that specific version of Windows. I’m sure the same is true for all kinds of specialized hardware chugging along to this day in factories near you!
CUDA and AI stuff is very much Linux focused. They run better and faster on Linux, and the industry puts their efforts into Linux. CNC and 3D printing software is mostly equal between Linux and Windows.
The one thing Linux lacks in this area is CAD support from the big players. FreeCAD and OpenCAD exist, and they work very well, but they do miss a lot of the polish the proprietary software has. There are proprietary CAD solutions for Linux, but they’re more industry specific and not general purpose like AutoCAD.
Good to hear!
My 3d printer works, but I wasn’t sure about CNC because of my experience with pick-n-place machines having poor support. It seems the more industrial you go, the fewer options you have for support.